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monkeywithdarts commented on Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly   mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11525... · Posted by u/bertman
wizzwizz4 · 3 months ago
Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)
monkeywithdarts · 3 months ago
I also don't know much about anarchist philosophy; would love some insight here if anyone can speak to that.

But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.

UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)

monkeywithdarts commented on Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly   mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11525... · Posted by u/bertman
Karrot_Kream · 3 months ago
> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant.

Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.

I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.

monkeywithdarts · 3 months ago
I really like the direction this thread is going. I've wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power, the other fears government power. If you allow two assumptions:

(1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money

(2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc).

... then someone who is skeptical of abuses of power should be wary of both government and corporate/wealthy power. But that seems like an untenable position — you can't check the one without muscling up the other.

Is there a way to maintain a small, decentralized, local-oriented government that can still check the power of corporate/wealthy/majoritarian impulses and provide a social safety net?

monkeywithdarts commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
tetris11 · 8 months ago
A tree cutting tool.

Take photos of the tree from 6 different angles, feed into a 3D model generator, erode the model and generate a 3D graph representation of the tree.

The tool suggests which cuts to make and where, given a restricted fall path (e.g. constrained by a neighbors yard on one side).

I create the fallen branches in their final state along the fall plane, and create individual correction vectors mapping them back to their original state, but in an order that does not intersect other branch vectors.

The idea came to me as a particularly difficult tree needed to come down in my friends yard, and we spent hours planning it out. I've already gotten some interest from the tree-surgeon community, I just need to appify it.

Second rendition will treat the problem more as a physics one than a graph one, with some energy-minimisation methods for solving.

monkeywithdarts · 8 months ago
I was imagining something like this for pruning fruit trees — something to help noobs like me see how to put pruning guidelines into practice on a real, overgrown tree. Good luck!

u/monkeywithdarts

KarmaCake day6April 28, 2025
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